Weird Ideas
I’ve been mulling over these two quotes from the bottom of yesterday’s @literaryhub daily email. I like them not just because they resonate with me as a writer, but they force me to reckon with why a book is “good” (in my eyes) or not. I love reading things that take me to unexpected places (I don’t mean that in a #readinginspo travel-via-reading kind of way) — writing that makes me go, “I would never have dreamed of mixing those words up like that.” Something that I used to think about as a kid was whether or not new songs would stop being written because we might somehow reach the end of different permutations of notes strung together. But then I reached my mid-teens and the doors of my music-loving soul were blown open and I realized that nope, that’s not possible. So it goes with words. And I think Erica Jong is absolutely right — the words that might claim our attention the most probably originate not from the over-confident pusher, but from someone who’s thinking, “I have this weird idea, and it’s sort of embarrassing, but…” I guess true art involves throwing logic out the window, but then somehow leading a reader to say, “This makes so much sense.” (This is why I’m not convinced AI can touch this type of prose.)
{PS: If you’ve read Kevin Wilson’s Now is Not the Time To Panic, don’t you think that the line from which the plot cascades — “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.” — must have come from some random free writing that he never thought would see the light of day?}
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